


The Keuka Horror

by OldShrewsburyian



Category: Elementary (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Arthur Conan Doyle Canon References, Background Femslash, Banter, Black Male Character, Canon-Typical Behavior, Case Fic, Coffee, Friendship, Multi, Murder Mystery, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Sherlock Being Sherlock, Some Humor, Story: The Adventure of the Devil's Foot, Tea, Vacation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:20:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24324919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/pseuds/OldShrewsburyian
Summary: Joan talks Sherlock into taking a vacation. Things do not go as planned.
Relationships: Marcus Bell & Joan Watson (Elementary), Marcus Bell & Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes & Joan Watson (Elementary)
Comments: 26
Kudos: 49
Collections: Holmestice Exchange - Summer 2020





	The Keuka Horror

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Keenir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keenir/gifts).



“Sherlock,” says Joan, for what feels like the millionth time, “you can’t go on like this.”

“Are you insinuating, Watson, that my work of improving Clyde’s terrarium is over-strenuous? I beg to differ. I am merely planting Rose of Sharon seeds, along with some bromeliads and strawberries. Of the latter, particularly, he is inordinately fond.”

Joan sighs. The work of his hands is delicate, and his fingers are almost completely steady. But she sees — she cannot help seeing — the too-definite line of his jaw, the underlying pallor of his skin. “Sherlock,” she says, “we need a vacation.”

“Hmm.” He puts his hands on his hips and contemplates Clyde. 

“I’m serious,” says Joan. “We’ve had the Brighton Beach gambler, the case of the volunteer docent, and the sinister conspiracy surrounding the retired Italian professor.”

“The Pearl of the Borgias.”

“If you insist.”

“I do,” says Sherlock, straightening, “and you’ve forgotten one.” 

Joan follows him into the kitchen, and watches him begin the process of making tea. “Okay, which one have I forgotten?”

“The sordid affair of the Damrosch Park circus.”

“Right,” says Joan. “Can’t imagine why — no, I was probably trying to block that one from my memory.”

Together they wait for the kettle to boil. The atmosphere in the kitchen could not be called companionable, but the silence becomes gradually less pointed. 

“Earl Grey?” asks Sherlock eventually.

“Please.” She waits until he’s handed her the mug. “Anyway,” says Joan, slightly too loudly, “I’ve rented us a house.”

Inhaling the steam from his tea, he does not open his eyes. “Indeed.”

“In the Finger Lakes,” continues Joan. “We can take the train to Rochester.”

“Am I to be given any choice in the matter?”

“Sherlock,” says Joan, more gently, “you can do damage to your brain, you know.”

She watches the spasm in his jaw; he opens his eyes only to glare at her. “Believe me, I am keenly aware of that fact. You, of all people…”

“I know,” says Joan softly. “I know. So just…” She takes a step across the stone flooring, but does not presume to touch him. “Just… accept this. For once.”

He scoffs under his breath. “And are you speaking as a doctor? As a friend? As a former sober companion?”

“Yeah,” says Joan, “I am.” The kitchen seems very quiet. They take the Empire Service out of Penn Station the next day.

* * *

“The lowest and vilest alleys of New York, Watson, do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”

“Oh, come on,” says Joan, and takes a deep breath of the pine-scented air. Looking up at the pale yellow house, she cannot suppress a grin. “You’re going to love it. All these new things to catalogue. Think of the soil types!” 

“There is that. This house,” he adds, shouldering their duffels, “is far too big for us.”

“So sue me,” says Joan, “I didn’t want to share with a bunch of drunken college students. Or a drunken college reunion. Or…”

“Granted, Watson.”

“We can figure out groceries tomorrow,” says Joan. “Take-out tonight?”

“Pizza,” says Sherlock.

“Really? You leave New York City and…”

“The local proprietors of pizza shops are the cousins who left a few generations ago. No reason to suspect that the knowledge of the old ways has been diluted. True, the cousins haven’t kept in training by keeping rats out of the dough, but…”

“Fine,” says Joan, “pizza, but I’m picking up a bottle of the local wine.”

“Good.”

The house sits directly above the lake, reached by a meandering path. On the other side, the ordinary patterns of human life are cut off, the road so far from them that even the noise of the mail truck is cut off by the intervening trees. 

For a few days, things are normal, if not by their usual standards.

The first morning, Joan wakes up naturally, and nearly panics. Her sense of disorientation is compounded by genuine unease when she fails to find Sherlock. While she waits for the drip coffeemaker, she wonders if he would actually go to the trouble of paying for a taxi to take him from the bottom of the rickety wooden steps here to the Brooklyn sidewalk outside the brownstone. She resists checking her phone for a full seven minutes. She is unsurprised to find that she has barely any signal. Normally a bonus on vacation, and yet…

The screen door bangs. “Watson!” proclaims her partner, in strident tones, “I have swum across the lake.”

Joan leans on the counter. “Good for you,” she calls, and finds her exasperation evaporating into amusement. “Good for you.”

It becomes a ritual. Every morning he goes swimming. She makes her coffee, and sits with it on the verandah — or, once she discovers such a thing is possible, on the roof. She can sit among the trees, where the world is loud with birdsong and nothing else. She knows that somewhere below, Sherlock is doing the backstroke. And strangely, on the roof of a rented house in the finger lakes, she feels entirely at home.

On the fifth morning, things change.

“Watson,” says Sherlock, as he enters dripping from the verandah, “something is amiss.”

“You’ve suddenly realized that we forgot to feed Clyde? I asked Ms. Hudson to take care of it.”

“No, with our neighbors.”

“With… Christine and Murad?”

“No, with our neighbors here.”

“I wasn’t aware we had any.”

“Drink your coffee, Watson. The siblings across the lake.”

“How do you know…? Never mind, I’m listening.” 

“Brenda is the sister,” says Sherlock, causing Joan to raise her eyebrows. “She hailed me after my first swim across the lake. She concluded that I was some sort of eccentric, and feared I might get into difficulties.”

“Mm,” says Joan into her coffee mug.

“We have since daily conversed,” adds Sherlock. Before Joan has recovered from the shock, he adds: “She and her brothers had no plans to leave, and yet they have not been astir this morning.”

“Maybe,” says Joan, “just maybe — hear me out here — they are hungover.”

“Nor,” counters Sherlock, “did they close the window sashes during last night’s thunderstorm.” 

“Again,” says Joan, “I’m leaning towards the hangover theory.”

“But you will agree that it is peculiar! Also, their lights are still on.”

“We are not investigating the strange case of the neighbors’ hangover, Sherlock. Especially as they aren’t our neighbors.”

“Aha!” exclaims Sherlock, with an air of triumph, and at first Joan does not know why. Then, a second after him, she hears it: the faint, familiar wail of a police siren.

Still disagreeing about the necessity of doing so, they dress. “It is merely an act of courtesy,” Sherlock says sententiously, “to inquire about the well-being of those in one’s immediate vicinity.”

“Yeah, well, the day you observe the social niceties is the day I retire.”

“Who knows what may have befallen them! Who knows what aid we might not be able to offer…” 

“Sherlock!” says Joan, as their paths diverge below the house.

“Hm?”

“Car?” She jangles the keys of the rented sedan.

“Much quicker this way, Watson; come.” 

She follows him down the path carefully, on the lookout for tree roots or pebbles or unwary earthworms. “Do not tell me,” says Joan, “that your plan includes swimming.”

“Naturally not, Watson,” says Sherlock loftily, and indicates their means of transport with a sweeping gesture.

“That’s a first,” says Joan; but she relents, and helps push the canoe out from the shore. She still feels faintly ridiculous, tying it up at the pier below the house opposite theirs. She realizes — as Sherlock had certainly done much earlier — that arriving by water also means that they avoid the lines of police tape, the flashing lights, the inevitable inquiries from…

“Marcus!” The detective is rounding the corner of the house, pulling on sterile gloves. “What are you doing here?”

“Nice to see you too, Joan.”

“No! I mean…”

“Usually I get that from him.”

“Marcus,” says Sherlock, “you wound me. What have we here — as my friend and partner rather precipitously inquired — that brings you to our sylvan retreat?”

“A possible connection to the death of a translator for the court system in his uptown apartment, is what we have.”

“Ah,” says Sherlock, rubbing his hands together.

Joan sighs.

“It’s not the motive,” says Marcus patiently, “it’s the method. Possibly a serial killer like that guy we were tracking a few years ago… Everyone’s a bit jumpy, that’s all.”

“Allow me to commend you, Marcus, for not haring off after motive. It is a common fallacy. Show how the thing was done, and that only one person could have done it that way — yes, Watson, in that place, in that time — and there you have it. How, When, Where, and Who. The _whys_ of a case may be suggestive, but they are essentially extraneous.”

“That was quite a speech,” observes Marcus dryly. “I think you’ve been on vacation too long.”

“Marcus!”

“Sorry, Joan. Lucky for your theory,” continues Marcus, resignedly, “it’s a locked room mystery.”

“Ah! Excellent.”

Joan merely sighs.

“Look,” says Marcus, “ordinarily this would mean a stack of paperwork and some fancy diplomacy, but the cop who found them is really freaked out.”

“ _Them?_ ” 

“Yeah. Sorry, Joan. So… I’m sure they’d be glad to have your help. I certainly would. Sherlock? You with us?”

Sherlock is rocking back and forth on his heels, frowning at the screened-in sun porch as though he could force it to yield its secrets. “ _Them_ , you said.”

“Yeah,” says Marcus patiently. “The Browns. Did you know them?”

“Hardly.”

“He knew the sister,” says Joan. 

“We’d spoken,” corrects her partner. “They are all dead, then?”

Marcus sighs. “Not yet. They’ve taken the woman to the hospital, but… it’s not looking good.”

Joan glances over at Sherlock, but his face is impassive; he merely squints up at the house as if trying to see through its walls. “I suppose the local constabulary have tramped all over the crime scene?”

Marcus just shakes his head. “Come on up. I’m going to look for signs of access this side…”

“Not worth your time,” says Sherlock. “We had hard rain last night. Deputize people to do it if you like, but they won’t find anything.”

“Right,” says Marcus. “Well, it’s not as if I particularly want to arrange dry-cleaning after spending a morning crawling through mud, so…”

“Tell us about your translator,” says Joan, as they walk up to the house.

“Damndest thing,” says Marcus. “We can’t even say it’s a murder. But the family up here still own the place, on 116th St. When I made the call to interview them… well, I got the local boys. He died in his apartment,” continues Marcus, “and there was no gas leak, and no pills he could have taken. Plenty of whisky in the apartment, but no signs of alcohol poisoning. No signs of poisoning at all, really.”

“You are not an imprecise man, Marcus,” says Sherlock.

“Thanks.”

“That _really_ is suggestive. What were the signs which to you seem so significant, though not admissible as evidence?”

“It’s not… Look,” says Marcus, “you’ll see when you look at the corpses.”

The SOCO team achieves a shade more unobtrusiveness in their presence, but Joan does not think she’s imagining the murmur of incredulity that is not quite protest. Sherlock, as usual, either does not notice or affects not to do so. 

“Ready?” asks Marcus; and when he draws back the sheeting, Joan understands why. Involuntarily she shivers. 

Sherlock lowers himself onto the floor, and examines it intently, brows drawn together, his body in a half-plank position. Joan leaves him to it, and goes to each of the windows in turn. “But they couldn’t have seen anything!” she says at last.

“And yet,” says Sherlock, springing to his feet, “they did see something. Really, Watson — how often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”

“Look,” says Joan, “just because they… just because they look like that doesn’t mean they saw anything.”

“And yet, it was the conclusion which you immediately drew.”

“No,” says Joan, chafing her arms, “it was just a feeling. An assumption, if you like. Medically speaking, it’s much more likely to be the result of poison, ingested or inhaled. Think of the symptoms associated with strychnine.”

“We ran a tox screen on the translator,” says Marcus. “Nothing.”

“That merely means,” says Sherlock, “that you did not find that for which you tested.”

“Take it up with Eugene, if you like; he was pretty thorough.”

“Mm.” Sherlock is now scowling at the table’s centerpiece. “Are there any other relatives?”

“We’re trying to get hold of some cousins,” says Marcus, “but…”

“Indeed,” says Sherlock. “And the inheritance? Did they own this house as well?”

“Yeah. Inherited, like the apartment. Parents did well in engineering, apparently. That, and they made some lucky investments when IBM seemed high-risk. You’d expect them to rent it out as an AirBnB or something, but mom lived here till she passed away last winter. Sister looked after her.”

“Surprising no one,” puts in Joan.

Marcus acknowledges this with a movement of his eyebrows. “Brothers work — worked — in Jersey and Rochester respectively, came up here for the summer. Family tradition, apparently.” Marcus sighs. “Card games. Old-fashioned family quality time. And then…”

“There’s little phone service and less internet,” says Sherlock dispassionately. “What do you make of this, Watson?”

“Of the lamp? It’s an antique.”

“Yes, and?”

Joan shrugs, shoving her hands into her pockets. “A lot of these old places have them. Local color, or whatever. It might have been here for a hundred years; they might have picked it up at a garage sale or one of those antique shops… Does it matter?”

“Seeing that it has been recently lit, it would be foolish not to consider the possibility.” 

Marcus approaches the table to inspect it with them. “This what they call a hurricane lamp?”

“Yeah,” says Joan. “We had a thunderstorm last night; maybe their power went out.”

Marcus makes a note. “I’ll get onto the power company.”

“Marcus,” says Sherlock, “may I take it that you have no objection if I avail myself of some of this powder for my own analysis?”

“Knock yourself out. I’ll make sure our boys have the rest bagged up.”

“Excellent.” He claps his hands. “Meanwhile, Watson and I will inspect the rest of the house.”

Joan makes a face at Marcus. “Apparently we’re inspecting the rest of the house.

“So,” she says to Sherlock, as she follows him up the stairs, “you want to tell me what’s bothering you?”

“It is infinitely more likely,” he says, “that these events are linked than mere coincidence: the death of the translator, the death of the Browns by the same means, the lamp that was extinguished and the lights that were on. That is clear, is it not?”

“Sure.”

“At least we may accept it as a working hypothesis.” He looks into the successive bedrooms, and dismisses them, pausing only to look through Brenda’s closet. Joan finds something rather poignant in the mixture of sundresses and flannel shirts: summer wear for all occasions. She herself is most struck by the old-fashioned chintzes, the wooden furniture, the curious, comforting smell that inheres in very old houses.

“The atmosphere in that room…”

Joan shudders. “Horrible.”

“As a result of the oil in the lamp?”

“Yeah, maybe.” She leans against the doorjamb of the bathroom. “You want to tell me why you’re sniffing that shampoo?”

“Excluding it from our inquiries. Look.” 

Joan recoils a little from the bright pink bottle thrust under her nose. “Yeah, that’s…” She takes it from him. “Sherlock, I don’t see what you’re getting here. Calendula-coconut. I used this brand all through high school. You can get it in any drugstore.”

“No doubt,” says Sherlock. “But none of that explains why shampoo to enhance ‘naturally or artificially golden’ highlights is in a Black woman’s bathroom.”

“Oh,” says Joan, a little blankly.

“You are usually more observant, Watson.”

“Yeah, well, sorry, I’m not feeling quite myself after the chamber of horrors downstairs.”

“And that in itself is suggestive,” says Sherlock, with surprising gentleness, and smiles at her.

“So what are we looking for? A mysterious blonde? That’s all very Sam Spade, isn’t it?”

“Surely there is a more obvious hypothesis, Watson. Ah, Marcus — here we must leave you to conduct a little experiment of our own.”

Marcus puts down his phone. “Don’t you want to hear what the hospital had to say?”

Sherlock stops as if tagged in a children’s game. 

“Sure,” says Joan, when he does not speak. 

“Well,” says Marcus, “it’s good news, unexpectedly. She’s woken up.”

A muscle tics in Sherlock’s cheek. “Doubtless her superior physical training,” he says, a thrum of satisfaction in his voice. “You may consult the runner’s shields in her bedroom, Marcus — or speak to her directly, when that is possible.”

“Great,” says Marcus. “Good talk.”

“Give her my regards,” says Sherlock, and continues out of the house and down the path to the lake, almost at a run.

“Are there times,” asks Marcus, “when he reminds you of a bloodhound?”

“Oh yeah,” says Joan, “absolutely.”

She catches up with Sherlock at the dock. “Are we not telling Marcus about the dangerous blonde?”

“Hardly dangerous, Watson. What’s more, he has all the vital clues. You will note that the family’s apartment in the city is on 116th — presumably west of the park.”

“Okay,” says Joan, climbing into the canoe. “What does this have to do with the dangerous — sorry, the non-dangerous — blonde?”

“Nothing,” says Sherlock. “I infer the identity of the blonde from the state of the bedrooms. And the closet, of course.”

“The closet?”

“Two women.”

“One woman can wear both dresses and plaid shirts, Sherlock,” says Joan. “There’s not a law against it.”

“Quite. But it would be remarkable for her to wear different sizes in each type of clothing.”

“Oh.”

“It is not so very farfetched, is it, Watson, to infer a girlfriend? A partner perhaps disapproved of by the brothers, perhaps even concealed from them?”

“Okay, I’ll buy it.”

“So: it only remains to uncover the murderer.”

“Right. But if there was no one else on the premises…”

“Quite so. If there was no one else on the premises, we can infer a family drama. The apartment is a valuable piece of real estate, Watson.”

“And if it is on West 116th, it’s in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.”

“Indeed. It is not impossible — it is not even improbable — that the brothers, who choose to live and work elsewhere, might seek to realize profit from their family inheritance, and that the sister, who cared for their mother in her last illness…”

“Might not,” finishes Joan. “Yeah. It checks out. It’s still conjecture, though.”

“Purest conjecture, Watson.”

“But if the brothers wanted to get rid of the sister…” Joan puts her paddle into the water, waits for the canoe to settle against the edge of the dock. “We can’t rule out the possibility, of course. But then how do they end up dead?”

“Whoso diggeth a pit, Watson.”

“Yeah, forgive me if I don’t take a random biblical proverb as evidence in a case.”

“We are about to provide ourselves with evidence, Watson. …And he that rolleth a stone, it shall return upon him.”

“I know I’ve mentioned it before,” says Joan, “but you had a truly weird education.”

He grins at her, and there is purely feral joy in his expression. “The kitchen table, I think,” says Sherlock, bounding up the path. By the time Joan reaches the house, he is removing a saucer from one of the cupboards.

“We are about to experiment, Watson, with the effects of that curious lamp oil.”

“The case of the curious lamp oil,” says Joan. “Great.”

“The experiment,” continues Sherlock, “will be recorded on our phones, and will bear witness to whether or not, having formed an intention, the brothers might not have been prevented from carrying it out.”

“Okay.”

“We will, of course, open a window — ” he hands her into the chair nearest it as he speaks — “and you are of course free to sensibly depart and leave me to it.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I am entirely sincere.”

“So am I. We’re partners; I’m not leaving.”

He smiles fleetingly at her. “Very well, Watson. So, my hypothesis is this: that the substance — which, as you have so rightly observed, must have been inhaled rather than ingested — was left in the apartment, to the undoing of its tenant. It could quite easily have been used to set a trap. An incense burner, one of those abominable scent diffusers, even the oven would serve the turn, to say nothing of a coffee pot. Where we are on shakier ground,” he continues, setting a match to the powder, “is with the deaths of the brothers themselves. Might they have meant to escape and been unable to? Might it indeed take effect so quickly?”

“I’m not happy about this, Sherlock.”

“Noted, Watson. Now.” With what seems to her infuriating calmness, he folds his hands in front of him on the table. It is not long before the powder begins to give off a thick, musky odor. For Joan, it brings with it shadows. They come as mist, as tendrils of hair. And then, in the shadows, there are shapes: a surgeon’s scalpel, a murderer’s knife. Moriarty smirks at her over the operating table. Andrew is lying on it and he is dead. Sherlock is lying on it and he is dead. Sherlock lies under her hands and he is bleeding, and she has killed him. Joan gasps, and shakes her head, and sees Sherlock’s face: he is dead, he is dead, he is alive. His hands grip the edge of the table, the table that is solid and real. His face is white, and rigid. He is far from her, and his face is drawn with horror.

“Damn it, Sherlock!” exclaims Joan. She gropes through the shadows, grasping for solidity, grasping for her surroundings. She gasps for air at the window — she’s not even sure if it’s fresh, she’s not even sure what’s real — and grabs for him. He is rigid, but unresisting. She barely gets them out of the house without breaking the screen door. They collapse, not quite in a heap, on the verandah. 

“Damn it, Sherlock,” she says again. She is panting, and her chest aches and her lungs burn, as if she had remained too long underwater. “You idiot.”

“No,” he says, and reaches out wildly. She cannot tell if he is seeking a handhold, or trying to beat back an assailant. His back arches, and his fingers curl against the uneven boards. “No, stop, don’t…”

“Hey,” says Joan, “hey, Sherlock, look at me. Look at me. That’s right. There we are. Okay, now breathe in for five — one, two, three, four, five — and out. That’s right.”

“Watson.” He is still rigid, but his gaze has cleared, his pupils approaching something like their normal size.

She smiles. She finds herself on the verge of tears with relief. “That’s right.”

“Watson,” he says again, and lies back, his shoulders suddenly relaxed under her hands. “I owe you an apology. It was an unjustifiable experiment even for one's self, and doubly so for a friend. I am really very sorry.”

“We’re partners,” says Joan. “I choose this. I choose you. You know that.”

He nodded, a little shakily. “Without a doubt, it should be your privilege to murder me, should you conclude at length that my follies had deserved it.”

“Weird argument against self-harm, but I’ll take it.”

“Thank you, my dear Watson.” For a few minutes more they are silent. The sun is burning the last of the mist from the lake.

“I cannot believe,” says Joan at length, “that you pulled that off.”

Still somewhat breathlessly, he laughs. “The lights being on in broad daylight and the remains of powder on the lamp were successive links in a fairly obvious chain. And now, my dear Watson, I think we may dismiss the matter from our mind and go back with a clear conscience to… our vacation.”

It is her turn to laugh. “You know what?”

“I’ve not the least idea.”

“I think, for our next vacation, we should go further away.”

“Capital idea, Watson. What do you say to Lagos?”

**Author's Note:**

> Posted with thanks to my kind and generous beta, [A_Candle_For_Sherlock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Candle_For_Sherlock/pseuds/A_Candle_For_Sherlock) and in hopes that this fulfills the recipient's hopes.


End file.
